• Citrix Unveils Open, Extensible, Turnkey Cloud Solutions
• Citrix Unveils Next XenServer Release as Reports Show Server Virtualization Market Share Growth
• NetScaler Delivers Industry’s First Virtualized Delivery Infrastructure for Microsoft 2010 Apps
• Citrix NetScaler Pay-as-You-Grow “Burst Packs” Make Networking More Elastic

Citrix announced the release of XenServer 5.6, which includes several significant feature improvements:

• Hypervisor-level role-based access controls (RBACs)
• Dynamic memory support
• Dynamic workload balancing
• Automated site (Read more...)

I’m excited to join my colleagues on the Gartner Blog Network and hope you continue to follow me there.

• Citrix and Wyse Accelerate Mainstream Adoption of Desktop Virtualization with Zero Client Technology
• Citrix XenClient Delivers Virtual Desktops “To Go”for Millions of Mobile Workers
• New Citrix “Safe Zone” Technology Enables Transparent Data Security for the Virtual Workforce
• Citrix HDX Nitro Technologies to Raise the Bar Again on Virtual Desktop Performance
• McAfee and Citrix Partner to Make Virtual Desktop Security Simpler and More Scalable

The most significant first day (Read more...)

Last Wednesday at Synergy we unveiled the Burton Group Server-hosted virtual desktop evaluation criteria and presented product scorecards for Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 and VMware View 4.0.1. Our evaluation criteria is frequently used by clients as a starting point for their RFPs; it identifies over 100 features, including 52 that we consider required for enterprise-scale deployments. We also detail preferred (important, but not always essential), and (Read more...)

Times have changed, but has your data protection and recovery architecture? Backup has historically been viewed as more  a necessary evil than an enabler for efficient IT. However, the infrastructure flexibility resulting from large scale server virtualization deployments – combined with innovative vendor solutions – is causing IT decision makers to rethink the role of traditional backup. Legacy CPU- and I/O-intensive agent-based approaches are being replaced by more efficient solutions that intelligently leverage server-less backup techniques and replication, while preserving what’s best in traditional archive approaches. Disaster recovery (DR) readiness capabilities are now verifiable with real time backup archive and application stack verification. DR no longer has to be an expensive add-on. Instead, it should be a feature of the data protection software. This session led by Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf, and Veeam’s Doug Hazelman (Senior Director, Product Strategy) outline steps organizations can take transform data protection from an operational nuisance to a solution that drives more dynamic and resilient IT operations. Along the way, attendees will also learn about best practices for migrating from legacy to modern data protection architectures, as well as have their most pressing questions answered by Chris Wolf and Veeam’s team of experts.

Registration is now open, so if you’re interested you can register here.

Anyway, if you’re not tired of my jokes and would like to see more of me at VMworld North America or VMworld Europe, you can vote for my sessions online. Note that you will need to register for a VMworld.com account if you don’t have one already.

Here are the descriptions of my sessions that are up for voting.

Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You

Many organizations are beginning to implement or plan server-hosted virtual desktop solutions. Vendor platform assessments in the emerging client virtualization market are often difficult due to a lack of defined acceptable standards. In this session, Burton senior analyst Chris Wolf and analyst Simon Bramfitt share Burton Group’s benchmark for evaluating server-hosted virtual desktop solutions, including criteria for evaluating a solution’s deployment, management, performance, integration, and user experience capabilities. The session concludes with a breakdown and scorecards of popular vendor solutions, including the current Citrix and VMware products.

Simon Bramfitt and I will repeat and expand on our session from Citrix Synergy and will include analysis of Microsoft VDI and Quest vWorkspace in addition to VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. If time permits we will assess more products too. You can vote for this session here. If you search for “Simon Bramfitt” you will find the session. I’m note sure why my name isn’t listed, but assume the voting system only accommodates one speaker.

Extreme Makeover: Data Protection Edition

Applying legacy data protection architectures to today’s heavily virtualized modern data center comes at a significant price in terms of both performance and consolidation density. We are at a time where organizations should reevaluate existing data protection practices and leverage new technologies to improve data recovery and lessen or eliminate the performance tax posed by many existing data protection architectures. This session breaks down modern VM data protection solutions, including VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection, array-level snapshots and replication, and third party enterprise backup software solutions. Attendees will be exposed to common data protection pitfalls as well as successful blueprints for modern VMware data protection architectures. Chris Wolf has been architecting data protection solutions for enterprise virtualization environments since 2002 and includes an abundance of lessons learned and best practices drawn from real world implementations in this session.

You can vote for this session here.

Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority

To realize the potential of private cloud, infrastructure must be capable of not just dynamically provisioning and optimizing systems, but also not violating any security, regulatory, or organizational policy constraints in the process. In many enterprise environments, dynamic IT consists of several disjointed solutions and oftentimes blind faith that policy, security, or regulatory constraints will not be broken. The bottom line – someone has to be in charge. The infrastructure authority (IA) is the future nerve center of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) operations. Among the many roles the IA possesses are:

• Provides a central metadata store
• Leverages common data models to request or offer services
• Maintains physical, virtual, and policy dependency maps
• Ensures security and regulatory compliance
• Ensures that service level requirements are met
• Stores and enforces organizational policy
• Ensures accurate capacity forecasts
• Integrates with third party management and orchestration tools to authorize IT operations such as provisioning or relocation before they proceed

Typical questions answered by the IA include:

• Are security zoning rules checked before live migrating a VM?
• Do any policy restrictions prevent VMs from migrating to different data centers or to public cloud infrastructure?

This session takes a practical look at the emerging role of the IA, and details how existing management frameworks such as VMware vCenter and industry standards such as OVF can be used in this capacity moving forward.

You can vote for this session here.

Geek Speak Tonight!

Date / Time: Tuesday May 11, 4:30 pm – 6:45 pm

Room:Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2000-2002

Speakers: Shawn Bass, Simon Crosby, Rick Dehlinger, Martin Duursma, Chris Fleck, Stephen Greenberg, Michael Harries, Alexander Ervik Johnsen, Harry Labana, Brian Madden, Brad Pedersen, Rene Vester, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

A series of open, lively discussions led by respected industry thought leaders will kick off Synergy, giving you a chance to start the conference with a breath of fresh, unfiltered air.
Topics include:

CTPs and CTOs on the future of desktops
4:30 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.
The desktop is primed for unprecedented change in the near future. Join a high-powered discussion and debate among CTPs and CTOs on exactly how that future will unfold.

Cloud computing: what makes it successful and what’s on the roadmap?
5:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Cloud computing is the term du jour in our industry. Where is the real activity happening? How will the cloud unfold over the next few years? How will the cloud affect you? Where are the opportunities for Citrix customers and partners? Join us for a discussion on cloud computing’s hot areas and risks, and what’s coming next.

XenDesktop 4: a new look at the VDI landscape
6:00 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.

Last year, Shawn Bass stirred the pot again by stating there were still some deficiencies in the various VDI solutions on the market. Twelve months have passed and Citrix has introduced XenDesktop 4. What does the VDI landscape look like today?

The Debate is Raging – Concurrent vs. User Based Licensing Models

Session Number:SYN512E

Track: Geek Speak Live!

Date / Time: Wednesday May 12, 1:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Room: Solutions Expo Hall – Lounge

Speakers: Stephen Greenberg, Joe Shonk, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

With the advent of application virtualization and cloud computing solutions, licensing has become a key factor in project cost modeling and technical implementations. A clear understanding of the available options, and how and where to apply them, are critical. This panel of industry experts will present and debate the various licensing models and use cases, and contrast their views with current industry practices. Topics will include the available types of license models and their relative merits, common challenges posed by licensing in planning and implementing products and the experts’ views on industry standards and their feedback to the major vendors.

Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: What the Vendors aren’t Telling You

Session Number: SYN313

Track: Desktop Virtualization

Date / Time: Wednesday May 12, 4:30 pm – 5:20 pm

Room: Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2003-2005

Session Type: Breakout

Speakers: Simon Bramfitt, Chris Wolf

Session Description:

Many organizations are planning or implementing server-hosted virtual desktop solutions. In the emerging client virtualization market, it can be difficult to assess vendor platforms due to a lack of defined and accepted standards. In this session, Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Simon Bramfitt share the Burton Group’s benchmark for evaluating server-hosted virtual desktop solutions, including criteria for evaluating deployment, management, performance, integration, and user experience. The session concludes with a breakdown and scorecards of popular solutions, including the current Citrix and VMware products.

Heterogeneous Virtual Infrastructures – Practical Solutions for Managing Multi-hypervisor Environments

Session Number: SYN207

Track: Datacenter and Cloud

Date / Time: May 13, 2:00 pm – 2:50 pm

Room: Moscone West Convention Center – Moscone 2014

Session Type: Breakout

Speaker: Chris Wolf

Session Description:

While standardizing on a single virtual infrastructure sounds ideal, many enterprises face the reality of managing multiple virtual infrastructures both inside and outside their datacenters. Multiple virtual infrastructures may reside across business units (i.e., server and desktop), departments, or sites. In addition, client hypervisors (e.g., VMware Player, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Sun VirtualBox) further compound hypervisor and VM image management.

In this session, you will learn:

• Strategies, architectures, and tools for managing heterogeneous virtual environments
• Common interoperability pitfalls and workarounds
• About security, data protection and recovery

Virtual Bridges

Virtual Bridges will be showing the 4.0 release of their VERDE suite. VERDE is a server-hosted virtual desktop solution that competes with products such as Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, and Quest vWorkspace. What’s unique about VERDE is that its backend infrastructure has no Windows requirements, which has appealed to cost sensitive organizations and service providers. VERDE 4.0 has some interesting features such as CloudBranch, which allows organizations or service providers to support low bandwidth WAN connections by deploying a proxy-like caching server to a remote site. This approach allows organizations to retain centralized management while serving up virtual desktops over the remote office LAN – key to satisfying user experience requirements. I had blogged about this type of approach last year. There’s quite a bit in the core architecture, including Windows, Linux, and Mac endpoint support and even local desktop support (like VMware View offline desktops or MokaFive) that can be booted from a USB drive. For more information on VERDE, take a look at Gabe Knuth’s review on brianmadden.com.

Kaviza

Citrix recently made an investment in Kaviza and since that time (April) Kaviza has been getting considerably more attention. Kaviza offers a VDI-in-a-box solution that is complementary to existing desktop virtualization solutions. With Kaviza, organizations can deploy a single on-premise server to host virtual desktops at a remote site. The solution is hypervisor agnostic and currently supports VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. The solution gives organizations or service providers a way to deliver virtual desktops to remote facilities without having to worry about WAN connectivity impacting performance. Kaviza was one of the vendors that participated in my Virtual Desktop NAS Vendor Challenge last year and you can read more about their solution in this post.

RingCube

RingCube was another participant in the Virtual Desktop NAS Challenge and has gotten considerable traction over the last twelve months (you can read their guest post here). Having large enterprises such as ING Bank using RingCube’s vDesk product in production, has helped to establish RingCube’s credibility. RingCube’s client-hosted virtual desktop solution allows users to run their virtual work space on their endpoint system, leveraging the local OS resources. This means that a separate VM isn’t needed. The vDesk architecture is closer to OS virtualization in its approach. Without the added overhead to run a separate full blown VM, organizations have liked the fact that they can use existing endpoint hardware (without having to upgrade memory, for example) for the vDesk solution.

Wanova

Wanova was one other participant in the VD-NAS Challenge and their guest post is available here. Wanova leverages some very intelligent streaming technology they call Distributed Desktop Virtualization. The solution centralizes desktop OS and application management and can be used to deploy user environments to physical or virtual endpoints. Wanova’s solution also allows IT to support a single base image for a desktop OS type while also supporting user-installed applications.

Unidesk

Unidesk is an interesting company that started making noise at last year’s VMworld North America conference. Unidesk positions itself as a complement to VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop (you can read about their architecture here), and prides itself on its layering technology. With Unidesk, IT can manage shared non-persistent golden virtual desktop images while still giving users the ability to install their own applications. User-installed apps with non-persistent images is an extremely difficult engineering challenge (both VMware and Citrix will admit this), and Unidesk claims to have the answer. Their booth is definitely worth a stop when you venture into Synergy’s expo hall.

Virtual Computer

There will be plenty of attention devoted to the bare metal client hypervisor at Synergy. While folks wait out the general availability of the Citrix XenClient and VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) solutions, they have the opportunity to look at a bare metal client hypervisor shipping today – Virtual Computer’s NxTop. Many of our large enterprise clients see the client hypervisor as a 2012 initiative, but that’s not to say the technology isn’t useful as a small business or department-level solution today. Also, even if your plans for client hypervisor are further down the road, it’s always good to begin building your knowledge base of the technology and to start thinking about the governance issues (e.g., treatment of personal user VMs on the corporate LAN) they create.

Server Virtualization and Cloud

Synergy is starting to pick up steam as a server virtualization and cloud event, and I didn’t want to ignore some of the innovative vendors in that space too. Vendor booths that I’ll be stopping by include:

• Cloud.com (formerly vmOps)
• DynamicOps
• Vyatta
• eG Innovations

Plenty Else to See

Like I said previously, there are plenty of other vendors that are bringing value to the industry. For example cruising by the McAfee, RSA, and Trend Micro booths is a good idea. All three vendors are brining considerable innovation to security and compliance in virtual server and desktop infrastructures. In the storage space, I recommend visiting the booths of the three winners of the Citrix Ready StorageLink Challenge: NetApp, HP, and GreenBytes.

Between the emerging solutions, excellent presentations, and always engaging hallway discussions, Synergy is shaping up to be a great conference. I hope to see you there. If I failed to recognize a particular product you find interesting, please post it as a comment.

• VMforce and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy (Steve Herrod)
• VMForce: Why? What? How? (Anshu Sharma)
• VMforce Provides Spring Cloud Platform (Rod Johnson)

These posts are also worth reading:

• Analyzing the VMforce announcement and  PaaS portability challenges and the VMforce example (William Vambenepe)
• Duncan Epping’s wrap up post

The move makes sense for both vendors. VMware understands that existing as a virtual infrastructure platform for Windows applications – where Microsoft is a direct competitor – is a losing battle. Many vendors have tried and failed in their efforts to take down Microsoft. In the end, the problem for Microsoft’s competitors was always the same – integration across the Microsoft stack would always win out. Paul Maritz realizes this and understands that without challenging Microsoft’s dominance in the application space, VMware will eventually succumb to Microsoft as the preferred virtual infrastructure platform for Windows applications. Partnering with providers such as Salesforce.com is a logical move for VMware. The more VMware can help Salesforce.com and Force.com pick up customers, the more they may see Microsoft’s dominance in the application space erode. This isn’t a strategy that plays out overnight, but over the next 10+ years. Along the way, I expect VMware to partner with key Microsoft rivals such as Google. Such a move is too sensible for both companies not to happen at some point.

For Salesforce.com, the VMware partnership and integration with VMware’s SpingSource Spring Framework offers the potential to bring in a large number of new customers. In addition, the combined VMforce.com solution utilizes VMware vSphere backend infrastructure. As standard cloud API and data models emerge over the coming years, close alignment with VMware should remove concerns of VMforce.com being perceived as a niche solution, and will be one that leverages known and trusted back end virtual infrastructure. This is important when you consider factors such as regulatory compliance. Large enterprises turning to the cloud are wary of lock-in, and the more providers can offer secure solutions that are compatible across numerous cloud solutions, the more likely enterprises are to invest.

While I like the move, there are still many unanswered questions. For starters, making it easy for Java developers to run complex application stacks in the cloud is a good start, but what about the .NET developer ecosystem? If VMware and its competitors want to take market share from Microsoft, they’re going to have to entice .NET developers to come their way. I have said for some time that I see Azure evolving to be both a cloud and on-premise solution. So in time Microsoft will be offering even more compelling reasons to to come their way or stay with them, and Microsoft’s competitors will need a very good answer to counter. If VMware succeeds with “Open PaaS”,” they may have the answer – a Java-based PaaS platform with choice on par with VMware’s vCloud ecosystem (1,000+ providers).

It’s also important to note that VMforce.com is not a pure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) play. You can’t package any app as a VM and deploy it to VMforce.com. Instead, the solution is positioned to support Java apps, a Force.com backend database, and leverage VMware vSphere plumbing. As a joint venture, VMware couldn’t get into IaaS for the simple reason that it would position VMware as a competitor with the providers in its vCloud ecosystem.

Finally, if you go back to Steve Herrod’s original post on the VMforce.com announcement, I couldn’t help but focus on the fact that “Open PaaS” was placed in quotes. In the past, I have asked vendors if some of their “features” should be in quotes, insinuating that a particular feature was a bit misleading. If you’ve been in IT long enough, you already know that “open” is a relative word, with openness subject to the number of supported vendor or provider alternatives out there. In the case of VMforce, “open” does not have to imply open source, but rather a defacto standard for PaaS with a large choice of provider solutions.

The following statement from Steve Herrod’s post alluded to VMware’s plans for Open PaaS.

One thing in particular mention here should strike you … we will wholeheartedly enable deployment of these cloud portable applications to clouds that are not based on our underlying vSphere virtualization technology. This support is a key aspect of openness and will enable a broader and more competitive ecosystem of compatible Spring PaaS offerings. And this in turn will be the reason why developers will bet on Spring-based applications for maximum flexibility. Stay tuned as you’ll see many more announcements around this very soon.

Steve is implying that apps deployed to VMforce.com can be moved to non-VMware infrastructure without a Force.com backend, which I mentioned earlier when discussing Open PaaS. If VMware succeeds with VMforce and gets numerous other providers to support Open PaaS along the way, they will have a serious alternative to Azure, and one that is devoid of provider lock-in.

As James McBride once said, the details always tell the story. Right now, we have a story. Whether or not the story will be remembered depends on the details. Give us standard APIs, application models, metadata sets, security frameworks, and modernized service-level definitions that apply to emerging cloud-based architectures, and we have a very compelling story. So far, the book on VMforce.com has a nice cover, but the meaningful content remains a mystery.